On Sat, Apr 25, 2020 at 04:37:43PM +0000, Caveman Al Toraboran wrote: > so i really can't believe that we have devolved in > such a way where malloc/free suddenly has became a > hard concept for homo sapiens.
You'd be surprised how much shocking code is out there, especially in
proprietary products (the Valve Steam Client is a prime example).
In general, reasons for memory-management-incompetence fall into the following
categories:
(a) Programmers forget. For experienced and skilled developers, this is
likely the most common cause of malloc-free mismatches. I was
programming in C a few years before I ever touched a computer (I
bought/stole Kernighan and Ritchie from the local library and
wrote out code-listings with pencil and paper), and to this day
still occasionally forget to free everything I malloc.
Thankfully, in the days of dynamic code-analysis tools such as
Valgrind, these problems---amongst other hard-to-spot
issues---become easy fixes.
(b) Programmers don't care, because it is assumed the operating system
will do it for them. I have heard this one quite a bit from
people trying to justify their horribly written code. Often,
with people who make this argument, the malloc-free mismatch is
the least of their problems, however in the days of intelligent
operating system-level memory-management seen in modern Linux
kernels, some programmers seem to take the hard work of kernel
developers as a free pass to be messy themselves.
(c) Programmers don't care, because the code means nothing to them. I
have never worked as a professional programmer, so I can only
speculate, but from conversations with veteran developers at
large companies such as Intel and Microsoft, it seems as though
the general morale amongst older developers can drop hugely. Why
bother optimising or thoroughly testing code when it's not
yours, and you don't really care about the company for whom
you're developing ?
(d) Programmers are genuinely unaware of the importance of freeing their
malloc'd objects. With the abundance of terrible on-line
tutorials, written by teachers that seem to devote themselves to
teaching the worst practices possible, I've seen an influx of
programmers who are simply unaware of the need to free their
memory pools. It takes less than a minute of on-line searching
to find a popular tutorial on some pretty website which shows
code leaking memory.
So yes, it is easy to understand, but whether people _care_ or even know in the
first place is entirely up to them.
--
Ashley Dixon
suugaku.co.uk
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